Page 87 of Honky Tonk Cowboy
“I don’t even know what—I didn’t order flowers.”
Frowning, the woman brought the clipboard back around. “Ethan Brand ordered them. Two lilies for each table, one red, one white. Special emphasis on each one having some of the other’s color in it. There’s a crystal vase for each set. We managed to get enough for fifty tables, as requested. That sufficient?”
“Oh…my gosh. Ethan did that?” Lily opened the sliding door wider, and the two women began carrying in long slender boxes with lilies lying inside beneath a layer of clear plastic just tucked around the edges all the way through to the original cantina. The dining room, she reminded herself.
Lily helped, impressed by how tenderly the women handled each stem, and hurried to the kitchen for a pitcher of water. After she’d filled all the pretty crystal vases, she checked her watch thinking she’d killed an hour, but only twenty-four minutes had passed.
Willow’s SUV pulled in next. There wasn’t room for it to pass the parked van, so she pulled out around onto the grass. Lily tapped the voice memo app on her phone and said, “Widen the entrance strip so it’s never blocked by a stopped vehicle.”
“That’s a very tiny problem,” Harrison said.
“May that be the only flaw we find the entire night,” Lily replied, and then she heard a crash and some shouting from the kitchen.
The roar of the crowd was deafening when Ethan wrapped the show, held up his guitar and took his final bow. And while they kept on cheering as he crossed the stage, he didn’t have any intention of coming back out for an encore. The lights shifted all at once, from him to the crowd, and it was a relief to have them out of his eyes. He looked out, just before he reached the curtain, just to take it in once again. He’d been doing that after every show, gazing out at the crowd once the lights went out and he could see. Trying to really appreciate the folks out there. It was hard to believe that many people had paid money just to watch him stand on a stage and sing his songs.
He was writing every night. He’d already told Ang there’d be no need to buy songs elsewhere.
He gazed out from the darkened stage, feeling great, and then suddenly…not so great. A large sombrero was moving through the mostly empty space in front of the front row.
Ethan stopped walking, narrowing his eyes, trying to see the face beneath the hat. Instead, a hand tapped the front brim, like a greeting.
It was him!
He moved fast, tapping down the concealed stairs, through the partitioned runway to his trailer, dropped his guitar there, and kept going, veering forward. He pulled his hat low over his eyes, hoping not to be recognized when he moved back through the dispersing crowd toward where he’d seen the hat.
But he needn’t have hurried.
It was on the head of the fellow who stood in the secure parking lot to the right of the audience. He was leaning against Ethan’s big red pickup truck.
Ethan had been moving fast, and came to a clumsy stop when he saw the stranger there. Then he moved more slowly until he stopped right in front of him. The other man’s head was still down-tilted, his face still hidden beneath the sombrero’s brim.
So Ethan said his name. “You Jeremiah Thorne?”
He lifted his head, revealing a bushy, untrimmed beard and blue eyes that were vivid and dark. “Yeah. And your brother,” he replied. He watched Ethan’s face, his eyes unflinching.
“So I been told. Same father, different mother.”
“Different mother, same ending.”
Ethan’s breath hitched in his chest. He had to swallow before he could speak and when he did, his voice sounded strangled. “De Lorean killed her?”
“She killed herself. But he caused it, yeah.” He broke eye contact, looked around them instead.
The crowd was still dispersing. Ethan saw a group of teenage girls watching them intently. Probably deciding whether he was himself or not. He had a hundred questions for Jeremiah. But they clearly couldn’t have a conversation out here. “You uh, want to talk in the trailer?”
“In the truck,” he said. “We need go get a move on.”
“Where we goin’?”
“Like the song says, home. And there’s reason to hurry, so go get your shit. I’ll explain on the way.”
Ethan met his brother’s eyes. They were dead serious. “I’ll go get my shit.” He unlocked the pickup’s doors, using the keypad, as the keys were back in his trailer. “Be right back.”
Jeremiah nodded and got into the passenger side to wait.
Ethan didn’t know his brother, so he sure as hell didn’t trust him. He was calling his uncle Garrett before he got five steps away.
“Son,” Garrett said when he picked up. “How was the show? You done already?”
